


The miscellaneous thoughts of ANBU Falcon

by skaralding



Series: Uchiha Itachi is Gaara's aniue?! [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, M/M, No Uchiha Massacre, Side Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2019-09-23 22:15:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17088731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skaralding/pseuds/skaralding
Summary: It’s because Shisui pays so much attention that he notices, early on, that there is something off about Itachi.





	1. thoughts on Itachi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Edited on 4/27/19 because having uniform tense throughout is cool and good.

Itachi always seemed a little bit… unreal, to Shisui. The clan heir, the genius so clearly on another level above someone like Shisui, who knows he just has the gift of processing things quicker than most kids, and is motivated enough to work himself to the bone to take advantage of it.

Shisui spent months honing his startling control of the grand fireball; Itachi, on the other hand, produced the final result after practising for all of a _week_ , working up the size ranks with insulting ease.

Then, as if to add insult to injury, Itachi went on to skip clan jutsu practice two weeks in a row, just so he could– as far as Shisui could tell– teach his younger brother, Sasuke, how to swim.

Back then, Shisui would never have dreamed of saying anything against such pointed dereliction of duty, not when his cousin’s long-running, all too obvious feud with Fugaku-sama over the matter of Sasuke’s education was such a reliable source of free entertainment. But he distinctly remembers looking in on one of the swimming sessions, and realizing that, not only was Sasuke learning deliberately slowly, Itachi was letting him get away with it.

It was no surprise to Shisui that Mikoto-sama eventually chose to step in. Sasuke wept and whined and screamed, but he began to improve much more swiftly; even he could see that, clearly enough that his morose requests for Ita-nii to please deliver him from training hell began to come only once a week, and then, once or twice a month.

‘Ita-nii’, intriguingly, never once showed signs of being moved to reassert himself in the matter of his brother’s education. Shisui teased him about each week’s new brother-provided nickname, and couldn’t help but feel quietly amused that Itachi was so blatantly biased against his father’s training methods that he would consider Mikoto-sama’s still quite harsh curriculum an improvement.

Or perhaps that was doing him a disservice; Itachi’s genius, after all, had been the main thing allowing him to survive Fugaku-sama’s ragingly ambitious schedule. It’s not uncharitable to say that Sasuke is only about as smart as your average motivated young Uchiha, but certainly nowhere near even Shisui’s level, much less that of Itachi.

(Shisui has always taken care not to be too uncharitable, because he knows it doesn’t come easily to him. He’s so grudging and so naturally ungenerous that he tight-fisted his way into the Mangekyo, for fuck’s sake. Selfishness is in his blood, and he hates it.)

* * *

Shisui doesn’t have time to make real friends, not even with Itachi. Though sometimes he thinks of that as a saving grace, since Itachi can be a bit… annoying.

Not because he’s too nice– he puts on such a good act that even villagers that frown at most Uchiha will smile at him, but it _is_ an act. Itachi is nice to people for a purpose, and that is something Shisui can deeply empathize with.

It isn’t even annoying that Itachi is just a little awkward; most geniuses are awkward. _Shisui_ would be awkward, too, if he didn’t pay such razor-sharp attention to people and how they react to everything. He can’t blame Itachi for not putting in that much effort into something he clearly doesn’t care about.

It’s because Shisui pays so much attention that he notices, early on, that there is something off about Itachi. He smiles, and the emotion reaches his eyes, but it isn’t quite real unless he’s looking at Mikoto-sama or Sasuke. He looks relaxed, too, but that’s because he’s watching everything, cataloguing it, evaluating it as Threat/No Threat, the way an infiltration expert in enemy territory might be.

None of that bothers Shisui– Itachi is an Uchiha, after all, and the clan heir, and a genius, and very clearly angry at the huge amount of pressure that comes with all of it. What annoys Shisui is that Itachi never even tries to talk about it with him, or with anyone at all, as far as Shisui can tell.

What annoys Shisui the most is that he’s quite sure he _could_ be friends with Itachi. Even knowing he’s not making the effort because he can’t spare the time doesn’t make Shisui feel any less miffed that Itachi won’t make the effort either, won’t even be the slightest bit honest around someone that could probably understand him.

He’d probably respond if Shisui made a visible effort– not because he’d want to, but because Shisui can be very persistent when he wants something. But Shisui, even though he wants to see what kind of face Itachi might make if he was truly bothered, simply returns his cousin’s fake, annoying smiles, and ignores the increasing tension beneath.

 _I don’t have the fucking time,_ he tells himself. _I’m far too worried about what’ll become of this fucking clan; peeling off Itachi’s shitty mask can wait._

* * *

Months later, feeling the blare and squeal of village-wide alarms in his bones, Shisui curses himself for a short-sighted idiot, a fool, a stupid– unseeing–

He doesn’t manage to drag the hood over his hair, but what does it matter? There’s many new ANBU like him, now, vaguely dark-haired and shorter than average, all thanks to the boy– the _target_ he’s currently chasing. No one watching will be able to know it’s Shisui.

No one, that is, but Itachi, who picks his pace up, and up, and _up_ , and laughs delightedly as he leaves them all behind. Shisui can only just manage to stay with him, half because (and he’ll never ever admit this out loud) Itachi is _letting_ him, is picking the straight shots and known paths that favour abuse of approximate shunshin, and half because–

Itachi did it. He _killed Danzo_ , even though he was inducted into ANBU under all too obvious protest, and thus automatically earmarked for induction into ROOT. Shisui only once tried to warn him, tried to get his cousin to understand the kind of treacherous game he was flirting with, only to give up in disgust when Itachi merely smiled and nodded and said, in his usual pleasant way, that he appreciated the warning. Never, of course, so much as hinting that he would do as Shisui was begging him to be, and be _careful_.

 _He’s going to break,_ Shisui had thought, bitter, despairing and resentful all at once. _Danzo will have him for breakfast, and when that happens, the clan will blame_ me.

Only, instead of breaking, Itachi just snapped. Violently, _gloriously_ , putting to use his old love-affair with the few, peeling tomes on sealing that the Konoha library would allow chunin to check out. Seals that Shisui was mostly used to seeing sloppily scrawled on Sasuke’s bento were warped into large, nearly solid dark circles that the Barrier Corps had to carefully work around. The knockout seal Shisui had seen his cousin slap onto _himself_ , so the rest of his Academy class could snicker at his increasingly loud snores until the teacher noticed, _that_ seal had been neatly applied to every ROOT member present in Danzo’s base.

Danzo’s office door had not been forced open. Despite the charring on his desk, and the other evidence of some sort of ninjutsu exchange, there was every indication that Itachi had simply walked into the elder’s office, entirely unmolested. That he may have been _invited in_.

Shisui wasn’t (yet) privileged to know what had actually happened, but it wasn’t hard to guess some of the essentials. Before Itachi snapped, it was common knowledge that he was soft; somehow, the staggering amount of skill required to _continue_ in that softness had begun to be ignored, deemed unimportant and irrelevant in light of the supposed morals of the young ninja that wielded all that skill.

Danzo must have thought he could handle Itachi, just the way the clan had thought they could steer Itachi, just the way Fugaku-sama had thought he could guide, persuade, influence or at least argue his soft young heir into doing what was best for the clan.

Shisui couldn’t blame any of them. Whenever Itachi had insisted on something, it had never really seemed very important. Okonomiyaki at one particular Akimichi stall. Teaching Sasuke to swim. Taking Sasuke for a run around the village walls instead of attending one of the informal clan meetings. Going to Morita-kun’s overblown sleepover party. Always having the last dango on the stick.

Shisui had thought of the way the younger ROOT agents ‘graduated’ to genin, and he had thought of his dango-loving cousin, his cousin with a brother complex anyone could see from all the way across Konoha, his cousin with the fake smiles and poorly hidden anger, and he had felt sick. He had known, in the back of his mind, that Itachi was the kind of person just soft enough, and crazed enough that he would train until he bled for an extra inch of precision, for a hint of speed, for anything that would give him the power to decide if someone fell at his hands and did not get up. But it had still been Itachi, practising his calligraphy over and over again by writing notes to his friends, so Shisui had thought it wouldn’t mean anything.

He hasn’t been so comprehensively wrong, and so _glad_ to be wrong, in…in… in forever. In his whole miserable life.

Which is why, when Itachi slows, and turns to banter, quite obviously preparing to eliminate his most persistent pursuer, Shisui opens himself to the coming blow with only a little guilt.

Naturally, that moment of fellow feeling comes back to bite him almost immediately. Shisui struggles, but does not, _will not_ scream, as his cousin steals his eyes.

He doesn’t cry when Itachi gives him his own eyes, in exchange. He can’t. He’s too angry, because it _hurts_ , and _hurts_ , and for a long, awful moment he was convinced that this dango-loving bastard was indeed the kind of agent Danzo prided himself on making, the kind of person that would open the neck of their own mother if ordered, and then wash off the blood with cool, steady hands.

It’s irrational, being so angry. It’s irrational, feeling enraged beneath and inside and around the constant, unrelenting terror of being bound and broken and helpless at Itachi’s feet, and then feeling annoyed on top of it all when Itachi asks him to take care of Sasuke.

 _Of course I will,_ Shisui wants to snap. But two more years of experience on the bloody battlefield say _SHUT UP_ and _ENEMY_ and _QUIET IF YOU WANT TO LIVE_ , and because he’s so angry, he obeys those old instincts, ignoring the older one that says this might be the last time he sees poor, crazy Itachi-kun alive.

“That idiot,” Shisui whispers, moments after he’s been left behind. “How long will he last, alone?”

 _Longer than you,_ he can almost hear Itachi say, with the widest, fakest possible smile. _Want to bet?_

Shisui wants to let out a dismissive snort, to shake his head and roll his eyes at the thought of taking a bet like that after everything that’s happened. He doesn’t, because he knows it’ll hurt too much to be worth it.

He still really wants to roll his eyes.

* * *


	2. thoughts on ROOT

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It didn't take very long for Shisui to realize that nothing was being done to help the ex-ROOT agents reintegrate into Konoha.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that the story tags have changed to reflect future events.

It didn’t take very long for Shisui to realize that nothing was being done to help the ex-ROOT agents reintegrate into Konoha.

The obvious things were done, of course, apartments portioned out, paperwork and passports and identification and certificates of residence all slowly and thoroughly regenerated. Clan ninja like Shisui, as always, received the most benefit, but even then, the sudden rush of support, of sympathetic looks and awkward attempts at socialization, all just served to highlight the separation he couldn’t help but feel from the village.

He’d like to say he called the first public meeting of ROOT discards on a whim, just to see if anyone would answer, or even because he was doing his duty by sounding out unstable elements in the village, but the truth of why he did it is depressingly simple. Walking through the marketplace one fine morning, on edge and yet smiling, he’d seen Yamanaka Fu haggling with a weapons merchant, and found himself drifting in that direction without quite meaning to.

(The third thing Shisui did on learning of Danzo’s demise was to dig up names and identities and match them to the few masks he remembered. Dangerous as he knew it was to seek the information, the satisfaction it had given him, though irrational, made the risk feel entirely worth it.)

Anyway, that one morning, Shisui hadn’t stopped at the weapons stall, hadn’t even appeared to notice Fu-san’s increasing tension as he approached, but as he left, he’d felt sick at heart. Fu-san was one of the few faces he’d known without having to look into it, because Fu-san had been one of Danzo’s prized tools for keeping order. Just seeing him on the street, his dirty blond hair incongruously bright in the sunlight, felt _wrong_.

The last time Shisui had seen him– he hadn’t wanted to think about it, but the memory had come to him anyway, the image horribly clear. Instead of facing it, he’d hurried home and locked his nice, solid door, and stared for an hour at the sketch he’d made of Danzo’s urn.

(Catching a glimpse of that sacred object was the second thing he did, after hearing the glorious news.)

Then, cursing himself, Shisui had got up, pulled on a soft greyish hood and made his way to one of the secret message drops, only to spot a boy about his age loitering in the vicinity. Shortish, silver-haired and pleasantly nondescript, the boy immediately seemed to him to be one of the faces he hadn’t found a name for, and unmistakably ex-ROOT. If only because Shisui couldn’t think of another reason for the boy to be bundled up and drinking tea, huddled on the balcony of a building across the street from the dilapidated convenience store that had used to be a ROOT message drop.

Seeing that boy up there made Shisui reckless. His first thought had been to try and sign to the other boy; then, thinking of the two ANBU that would probably watch that attempt at conversation, he’d decided against it, choosing to take out a pencil and some paper and write out a message in last week’s standard ANBU cipher.

‘Meet. 1 wk. All, empty dojo on this st, public. Pass the word.’

* * *

Somehow, Shisui didn’t expect his hasty, reckless message to bring _literally everyone_ to the abandoned dojo he pointed out.

He wasn’t the only one that didn’t bother with a mask, and wasn’t sure what it said about him that he felt almost comfortable with that. That in fact, the slight skittishness he felt at the uneven exchange of wordless information was far less worrying to Shisui than the way people formed up in the dojo in ranks, waiting patiently as he called roll and made lists and asked for self-reports.

He was _thirteen years old_. No one should have been trusting him with this! He had _seen_ the fucking ANBU teams trailing some of the other ex-ROOT, seen those ANBU calmly settling into convenient shadows and perching on rooftops, all within easy listening range of the dojo, whose old, cracked windows had all just as conveniently disappeared or been broken during the week. For goodness’s sake, he could _hear_ his own guard shifting just outside that window, just passively _listening in_ to Shisui’s takeover of ROOT without so much as thinking of lifting a finger to stop him!

Naturally, if he was ever questioned, he’d say he called the meeting because he worried for his peers– his actual peers, the agents his age and younger. And add that he hadn’t expected anyone else to show up (true), and just supposed they might as well all report in, since they did show up (also terrifyingly true). But saying all that wouldn’t make it true on more than a superficial level.

“The external agents are all being recalled, aren’t they?” Yakushi-san– the boy from the balcony– asked, in a disinterested monotone, and what Shisui really heard was that the boy cared so desperately about the topic that he would risk asking that in the open. Revealing something, for nothing. “Is there a time estimate, or a deadline for their return?”

There wasn’t. There were no fixed deadlines for anything, but… “I’ll find out,” he said, and couldn’t help but feel a sick thrill at the way everyone looked at him then. “I’ll report in next week, when we meet again.” He was careful with his tone as he said that, careful to keep it even and relaxed, and he hated himself, just a little, for enjoying the way he could see the tension starting to leak out of the stances of the ninja in front of him.

“Same location?” someone else asked– Higawa? Hitawa?

_Have to learn names,_ Shisui thought, even as he said, “I don’t see why not. It’s more than big enough, at least for now.” More tension, just as he expected. _‘For now’,_ they were definitely all thinking. _What the fuck is he planning, that he’d say ‘for now’?_ “We can re-evaluate when the external agents return.” And just like that, the tension was gone again, as if that manipulative choice of words meant anything.

Probably, the older agents were simply mimicking that cycle of emotion in order to fit in, continuing their instinctive camouflage from force of habit. And Shisui couldn’t discount the idea that some fraction of them might actually be here on autopilot, too lost in Danzo’s poisonous teachings to make even the simplest decisions for themselves when presented with the chance to obey.

The rest of them, though, the kids and the teens and not-quite-adults? They might as well all have re-keyed their tongue seals to Shisui.

“Any more questions?” Shisui asked, expecting no answer, and was unsurprised when he received none. “See you all next week. Same time, same place.”

* * *

He _was_ surprised to find that most of the externally placed agents chose to return to Konoha over the next two months, some of them more quickly than others.

Shisui, still struggling against the impending weight of unasked-for responsibility, began to attend ‘suggested’ meetings with the ANBU commander and the Jonin commander, alongside two much older and far more seasoned-looking ROOT agents he thought he recognized from that very first gathering, but he couldn’t help but keep expecting someone to wise up and turn him away. It wasn’t just that much of the information he was being made privy to was extremely sensitive; it was also the fact that when he dared to offer an opinion, or answer a question for clarification, Nara Shikaku actually seemed to _listen_ to him.

When Shisui insisted (‘strongly and respectfully suggested’) that everyone under the age of thirteen be put back into the Academy and forced to graduate on the regular schedule, Nara-sama only grumbled for a bit and argued with the stony-voiced commander– whose name Shisui _still_ didn’t know– over what that would do to both Academy discipline and mission completion rates.

When Shisui explained, at painful and terrifying length, why ex-ROOT should be spread out as much as possible, with no more than one of them to a standard ninja team, and no more than two to an ANBU team, even though that would necessarily mean more short-term friction, he was expecting to be ignored, or perhaps just humoured with one or two token teams in what he thought was the optimal configuration. He didn’t expect the ANBU commander to veto his suggestion entirely, and then also tell him point blank that if he wanted to spend that much effort on team reintegration, he could damn well do all the work forging it himself.

Since Shisui, like every other ex-ROOT member, was currently on mandatory in-village leave, he took that not-quite suggestion to heart. He took it so much to heart that he was ruthless about manipulating forth the desired results, which, in most cases, was as simple as telling his former compatriots that the ANBU commander thought ex-ROOT stock was inferior because they’d had far higher casualty rates than regular ANBU despite a more or less equal mission success rate.

“I’ve got nothing better to do, anyway,” Shisui said, his voice sounding just a little loud in the offended silence left in the wake of his somewhat exaggerated statements. “I’m going to make sure _my_ team makes that rock-faced fucker eat his words.”

The especially hilarious thing was, he actually, no, _they_ actually managed it in the laziest way possible: by feverishly training up field medics and making sure one was on every team. They all, to a ninja, had already learned precision, economy, and least wasted effort, so it wasn’t difficult for some of them to expand their medical knowledge enough for it to be useful in the field. Motivated by spite and the terror of having too much time to think about the past, once their mandatory leave was over, the eight and a half ex-ROOT teams poured themselves into Fire Country C- and B-ranks as if nothing else mattered, and over the next few months, they didn’t lose a single member in the field.

There were injuries, of course, as well as some non-mission-related hiccups. Ueno Yuuki’s alcohol problem landed him in the hospital a couple times with the occasional concussion, and nearly all of the younger contingent had their library and training ground access hours strictly curtailed, but that was not at all the worst outcome that could have come about from Shisui’s sly challenge. Really, the only actual problem with the challenge itself was that occasionally, an ex-ROOT team would spot Uchiha Itachi, a.k.a. the Black Hand, in the wild, and would sink a few hours of furious effort into trying to capture him.

Every team that tried that came back a day or two late, exhausted and sullen and plastered in nonsense seals, but they didn’t stop trying, no matter how patiently Nara-sama explained that one single A-rank nuke-nin really wasn’t worth diverting from their original mission plans.

Finally, three and a half years after Itachi’s madcap defection, Shisui threw a fit and conspired with Fu and Kabuto to alter the proofs for the next printing of the their bingo book. Then, while the stony Bear-san (whose name Shisui was sure he would die without ever knowing) frowned at his back, Shisui explained to the Hokage that the time and effort it would require to pin down and eliminate Uchiha Itachi as a threat to the village was better spent on improving the whole force’s general understanding of and competence with fuinjutsu.

“What I’m trying to say, Hokage-sama,” Shisui added, “is that if even Jiraiya-sama can’t trap him, it’s long past time that it is publicly acknowledged. Marking him as ‘flee on sight’ won’t stop my teams from sniffing after his tracks, but at least they’ll have to lie about it.”

(No one in that meeting said a single word about how disturbing it was that said stubborn teams had just as often encountered the Black Hand on his way _out_ of Fire country as they had encountered him trying to come _in_.)

Not six months later, Kiri upgraded Itachi to ‘flee on sight’ for apparently excessive bloodshed while under contract for the brutal deconstruction of Hanzō’s stronghold in Ame, and Shisui couldn’t help but feel a little vindicated, as well as a lot more worried. Every report he’d received on Itachi’s actions and mental state all but shouted that he was much more mentally balanced than one would expect from someone with his reputation. Thinking of how far overboard Itachi would have to go to get in Kiri’s bad books made Shisui feel cold; thinking of _why_ Itachi would feel the need to burn his bridges in that way made Shisui flinch.

The only thing good about the report was the fact that it made all his teams much more wary of encountering Itachi.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two more chapters of this to come... :D


	3. thoughts on the kids

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shisui's thoughts on the small circle of idiot children he somehow managed to become partly responsible for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shisui is meant to be about 20 in this chapter, which is set around 7 years on from events in the previous one.

Shisui was committed to doing his best for Sasuke, but he drew the line at having to be around the little shit any more than was seriously necessary. When the Hokage carefully asked him if he had any objection against Nara Whoever taking on Sasuke’s genin team, he was hard-pressed not to sigh in relief.

Really, it was already bad enough that Shisui had already had to hear about what Sasuke-teme said, and how fast Sasuke-teme could throw shuriken, for the last _five fucking years_.

Sometimes, he wished that Sai hadn’t let the little Uzumaki brat follow him home to Shisui’s apartment that one time. Even foisting Uzumaki off on Hatake-san when he made genin last year didn’t stop him from coming over to Shisui’s to whine about Sasuke; it had just changed the content from things like ‘Sasuke-teme called me dead last _again_ ’ to ‘Sasuke-teme said there’s no way I’ll make chunin before him, even though _I_ graduated _first_ ’.

And then Naruto not only got promoted to chunin on his first try, he managed to do it in _Kiri_ , with his whole fucked up team. So nowadays Shisui was forced to nod and smile sympathetically while Sasuke grumbled about how the dobe needed his head punctured, and how it wasn’t like Kiri was really the Bloody Mist anymore, so it wasn’t like doing the exam there was really any more risky than doing it here in Konoha.

Shisui did draw the line at so much as appearing to agree when Sasuke muttered that at least Naruto had a _real_ kunoichi on his team. Shisui still wasn’t sure what kind of freakish magic Naruto worked on Akiyama Riko to turn her from the living personification of a lone wolf into the kind of person willing to to be caught by one of Sai’s birds after literally running off a cliff. In contrast to the surly, snarling Riko-san that used to exist, Aburame Miho was quite the team player.

Not that Shisui would bother trying to tell Sasuke that. Some things, Sasuke was only willing to fully believe if he could deduce them on his own.

* * *

When it came to his own genin team, Shisui cheated his heart out. He’d always kept an eye on Sasuke’s graduating class as a matter of habit, just from being there to pick up either Naruto or Sasuke, so he already knew who he wanted when push came to shove.

The Hokage had hemmed and hawed about the idea of an all-kunoichi team, even though Shisui was careful to request two girls that otherwise would have been shunted off to the Genin Corps, in addition to the civilian girl that was too smart to go that way, but still very much the odd one out when it came to team formulation. The Hokage had still caved, because he _owed_ Shisui for the fact that Hatake could strut around boasting of his one-year-chunin when it was blindingly obvious he didn’t know the first thing about how to motivate and teach anything other than ANBU rookies that could basically pilot themselves.

So, while Sasuke was walking off with his Aburame and his Hyuuga (ex-ROOT, for Shisui’s peace of mind), Shisui found himself smiling pleasantly down at three blushing girls, and trying not to have second thoughts.

The general idea was that, with Senju Tsunade’s continued truancy, and Jiraiya-sama’s self-assigned diplomatic mission in Ame (which mostly seemed to involve him losing fights to Ame’s top jonin), the village was sorely lacking in ninja role models. The third and fourth most famous Konoha-nin were nuke-nin, for fuck’s sake. It was not a good look, and it was something Shisui couldn’t cheat around by throwing his better ex-ROOT at the problem, since most of them were far too happy with keeping a low profile to want anything to do with the spotlight.

So Shisui smiled at Haruno, Kawamura and Ouji, and he tested them harder than he probably should have, justifying it with the thought that learning to bear up under unreasonable pressure would be good for them in future even if they didn’t end up ranking as one of Konoha’s greats.

The girls went from hating each other and watching him with starry eyes to simply hating him. It was _fun_. It was almost a little _too_ fun, to the point that Shisui found himself grumbling about having to take time away from his ~~victims~~ students to oversee the induction of new ROOT.

It wasn’t called that anymore by anyone, but that _was_ what the ANBU Special Missions Branch boiled down to, these days: ex-ROOT, baby ex-ROOT and mentally unstable ANBU that wouldn’t do well if forced into retirement. Shisui didn’t intend for any of his students to join up– ANBU was bad enough, and even though neo-ROOT agents didn’t drop like flies anymore, they did get first shot at all the missions no one wanted.

It wasn’t that Kawamura, Haruno and Ouji struck Shisui as soft; it was the fact that he would much prefer for them to remain visible, to come up through the ranks and have relationships and rivalries and other such ties to Konoha ninja and allied ninja in other villages, such as the weird thing that Maito Gai and Hoshigaki Kisame had developed over the years.

(It wasn’t entirely surprising that Gai-san didn’t have the decency to limit himself to _one_ well-known rivalry. Thankfully Hoshigaki was too much in demand in and around Kiri to have time to devote to diplomatic missions to Konoha.)

(Shisui nearly died laughing when he saw Hatake’s unsubtle attempts to keep Gai-san occupied during Hoshigaki’s last mission here.)

In any case, what Shisui wanted for his three little ducklings was for them to grow up to have terrifying bingo book entries and starry-eyed academy brats declaring their goal to be just like Ami-sama, Sakura-sama or Yui-sama.

Somehow, he failed to account for the fact that, occasionally, there was no getting around his having to be at the neo-ROOT training ground for one reason or another, and so his ducklings were occasionally forced to be there too. Most of the ROOT politely ignored them (all while watching them intently and offering Shisui annoying snippets of advice days later), but. That was only most of them.

“Haruno-san,” Kabuto said, one fine, cool autumn day, some months after the Konoha chunin exams had come and gone, “just a small tip; you’re not being precise enough when forming your scalpels.”

Haruno Sakura, who had surprisingly turned out to be Shisui’s most… explosive student, did not take kindly to being corrected by a mildly smiling young man in casual clothes. Since she was Shisui’s student, however reluctantly, she expressed her displeasure with a bow and a smile and a sweet, pointed offer for shinobi-san to lesson her in what she was doing wrong.

That little training spar ended up destroying half the training ground, putting fine fractures all through Sakura’s arms, and making Kabuto upset. “Was it my tone?” he asked Shisui, later that evening, after he and Sakura and Shisui had all been screamed at by the attending nurse. “I was nice. I’m good at being nice.”

“You were very nice,” Shisui said, as he tried to knead the tension out of Kabuto’s shoulders. “Sakura-chan’s just…” Touchy on a good day? Still angry that her evil new sensei had used her and her teammates’ ill-omened crush on him against them? Panicking at the realization of how far behind she was compared to competent clan-raised kunoichi? “She’s young, and angry, and everything’s an outlet these days. It wasn’t really about you.”

Then, when Kabuto shifted against his hands, but did not answer, Shisui added: “I’ll try to get across how much of a compliment it was, your trying to correct her.” Sakura, unlike his other ducklings, had been lauded enough in school that she was sensitive to criticism, and prone to taking it as meaning that she was a failure, rather than that she was someone worth correcting. “Okay, Kabucchin?”

Kabuto gave him a level look, and deliberately moved away from him, forcing Shisui to pursue him all the way into their bedroom, but Shisui counted the matter solved, and tried not to feel too annoyed with his stupid duckling genin for making Kabuto doubt his hard-won ability to ingratiate himself. Kabuto liked being liked in Konoha; the only reason he hadn’t been more upset that Gotou-sensei had yelled at him was the fact that Gotou-sensei’s default volume was a shout, and so a scream wasn’t that much worse.

Then, the next day, as Shisui smirked at his genin while they tried to put the training ground back to rights, Kabuto showed up to help. And by help, he meant making more mild, smiling comments about Sakura’s inadequacies, and standing over her while she grudgingly tried to correct them.

(Shisui couldn’t help but be just a little jealous that Sakura was so wary of Kabuto; ever since she’d realized that there was only so severely Shisui would punish any of his genin, she had been a bratty little bitch to him in public.)

After Kabuto started inserting himself into the team’s training process, more neo-ROOT started showing up to their training sessions with paper thin or even nonexistent excuses. Shisui, worried that this would negatively affect his genin, was instead somewhat chagrined to find that they bloomed under the added, often sarcastic attention.

Ami-chan collected advice from everyone and sundry, but particularly focused on Fu’s wordless demonstrations, and Shisui was not entirely surprised when he started finding them both at the training ground whenever he got there. Yui bonded with a quiet, blank-faced kunoichi that Shisui knew only as Eri, and she became obsessed with emulating Eri’s preternatural skill with senbon.

Overall, it was a good thing: his genin improved in leaps and bounds, and the moan-and-groan-about-sensei sessions soon turned into them showing off new skills and trying to see how to mesh them together.

* * *

Strangely enough, though Shisui worried at length about how to keep his ducklings from joining ANBU, only one of them ever actually showed interest in joining, and it was (in his opinion) the wrong one. Or, at least, not the one he’d been expecting. Much as she worshipped Fu-sensei, Ami had never not been _loud_ , determined to make her mark on the world in one way or another. She made her case for being seconded into Assassination using irrefutable logic (“everything else is just way too boring”), and, when he refused to recommend her to Bear-san, somehow managed to forge one and get it to the right place.

Bear-san was, though not impressed, not at all receptive to washing her out of ANBU training on Shisui’s say-so. Naturally he sighed and shook his head and said vague things about how she’d wash out on her own if she truly couldn’t keep up, but the obvious subtext was that Shisui better step back if she _could_ keep up. Which she did, and with such relish that Shisui couldn’t really justify drawing Bear-san aside to strongly suggest that she didn’t get sent out on any missions that were even the slightest bit beyond her capabilities.

Yui-chan– the one Shisui had been mostly prepared to lose to the shadows– ended up blazing her own weird trail, delaying her chunin promotion so she could deepen her foundation in the axe and the hammer, and then blowing straight through to jonin off the back of a string of standout missions near Kumo. Her bingo book entry was a thing of beauty, her skill description a short, sulky snippet warning that not only was she never truly unarmed, most fights were a foregone conclusion when she _was_ armed.

In a way, it wasn’t a complete surprise. Back when they’d all just made chunin, Sakura had offered to share with her teammates the dark secrets of strength that she’d mined from dogged experimentation and analysis of Tsunade-san’s grudgingly offered notes, and though both Yui and Ami had taken her up on it, the way they had done so had been particularly revelatory. Where Ami played around and stopped when she was able to perform superhuman throws and very easily snap people’s necks with her bare hands, Yui had only persisted until the amount of force she could exert with her favourite pair of axes in hand was just short of warping the weapons.

When asked why, Yui had said, very earnestly, that there was no point in being so strong that any of her weapons couldn’t handle it. “High-grade folded steel is _expensive_ ,” she’d said, as if price had ever been a demonstrable concern for her. Even with the flat 20% discount that nearly all the weaponsmiths in Konoha gave her, she regularly managed to spend herself almost broke on new items and replacements.

Shisui, half chagrined, half satisfied that his shy, quiet student has blossomed into a notable weapons master, had simply nodded and done his best to soothe Sakura’s offended pride.

Now _there_ was a girl that hadn’t turned out at all like he was expecting. ANBU reached out to her and was decisively turned down in favour of Intelligence. Two years later, she was moonlighting as a Hunter-nin. A year after that, she split her time between Diplomacy, helping out at the hospital and manning the Missions Desk.

It was obvious what she was aiming for, so blindly obvious to Shisui that he couldn’t understand why no one else could see it. Well, no one else other than (of all people) Naruto, who never shirked a chance to drop by Shisui’s apartment to bitterly complain about how Jiraiya-sensei’s insistence on dragging Naruto along on his many journeys was holding Naruto back.

“If this keeps happening, _she’ll_ be Hokage first,” Naruto would say, “and then she’ll have _won_.” It was never clear from his tone of voice which of those things would be the most damaging to his pride, which had indeed grown high off the back of his not just beating Sasuke to chunin, but also managing to hit tokubetsu a mere month before Sasuke was also offered the opportunity to take the trial.

“I don’t know what he’s so worried about,” Sakura said, the one time Shisui gave into the urge to bring up the topic with her. “We both agreed that whoever got the hat first would name the other as their successor. And besides,” she added, with her now trademark, venomously sweet smile, “if _I_ win the hat, that might actually be the fastest way for _him_ to get anywhere near it…”

Shisui, at that point, could only smother his urge to laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to come...


	4. thoughts on the future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the years roll on, Sakura's contest with Naruto comes to a head, and Shisui makes a big decision.

The day Sakura was named senior aide to the increasingly tired Hokage, Shisui was reluctantly ready to step up and be a shoulder for Naruto to cry on (then get drunk on, and possibly vomit on), but though he stayed up until the evening shift switch had definitely gone over, Naruto never turned up.

“Do you really think he won’t wake you up whenever he ends up coming by?” Kabuto said, his hoarse, sleepy voice just a little more waspish than usual. When Shisui turned to look at his lover, his heart couldn’t help but skip a beat. The sight of Kabuto’s cleanly muscled, half-dressed form was indeed something to look at, but it was nothing compared to the slight, but definite frown on his face. “Come to bed.”

“Okay,” Shisui said, his mouth dry, his body already moving to obey. He didn’t think he’d ever get used to these moments, the brief times when Kabuto would drop even that habitual, almost-smile and act– not _spoiled_ , not quite that, just a bit difficult. “Can we…”

Stony, deliberate silence was his initial answer. Then, moments later, when they were pressed close together, just inside the bedroom door: “Pervert.”

Shisui could never be sure whether any of this, or even all of it, was real. Whether that low, very nearly resentful, slightly breathless word was all just part of Kabuto’s never ending act. But it was so stimulating that he could never bring himself to care.

Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly low, he would think about how devoted Kabuto was to keeping up appearances. How he expressed his loyalty and his deep, unspoken gratitude with actions and behaviours and never, ever with words. How likely it was that, the first time Kabuto had let himself be held by Shisui, he had only been doing so because of that deep gratitude.

How filthy it was of Shisui that, knowing all of that, he still wanted– and _kept_ – Kabuto anyway.

Tonight, Shisui was once again driven to the brink, unable to keep from leaving marks. “I’m never going to let you go,” he said, towards the end, his voice flat and thin from effort, from his ruthless pursuit to wring every last ounce of pleasure from Kabuto’s skilled touch, Kabuto’s tireless body. “You understand? _Never._ ”

“Yes,” Kabuto gasped, but it was unclear whether that was in response to Shisui’s desperate, revealing words, or if it was something mindlessly said, the fruit of Kabuto’s current attempt to fuck him through the mattress. “I’m…”

“Do it,” Shisui said, fiercely, squeezing down around him, half proud and half conflicted that it never took very long like this, that his lover was so sensitive to this particular kind of pressure that Shisui had to fight to be relaxed throughout if he wanted to come first.

* * *

Afterwards, Shisui was too tired to think much of Naruto’s disappointment, and the impending annual diplomatic exchange with Kiri occupied Shisui’s thoughts so completely that it was a whole week before he remembered to check on Naruto at all.

When he did finally swing by Naruto’s apartment one evening, he was surprised to find Sakura there. And not just there, but _there_ , her hair down, a skimpy nightshirt and some worn shorts all that she could clearly be bothered to wear. “Sensei?” she said, her tone of polite surprise not at all matching the smug satisfaction in her gaze. “Naruto’s showering, he shouldn’t be long.”

Shisui, painfully familiar with Naruto’s past, ill-fated crush on the girl, no, the woman who would become their Hokage, could not be too surprised by this turn of events. Rather, his surprise was that Sakura, rather than neatly turning Naruto down, or perhaps going along with him just long enough to dump his drunk, clingy self off at home, had perhaps been a little _too_ generous while consoling him over losing their ridiculous bet.

“This–”

Sakura stepped forward, her stance just short of threatening, her smile as sweet as ever. “If you get to do what you like with Yakushi-san,” she said, her voice just low enough to be heard, “I don’t see why I can’t do what I want with Naruto.”

Shisui closed his eyes for a moment, resisting the sudden, entirely counter-productive urge start a fight that would only end in sullenness and broken bones for both participants. “Did I say anything?” he found himself snapping. “I wasn’t even going to bother to scold you! Am I really not even allowed to hint at my surprise at finding you here?”

“Nope,” Sakura said, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “Not until I get the wedding invitation.”

Shisui rolled his eyes, already slipping in past Sakura, doing his best to ignore her innocent smile. He still wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve her declaring, something like three or four years ago, that unless Shisui did the honourable thing and made an honest man out of ‘Yakushi-san’ immediately, he would forfeit all right to poke his nose into his students’ love lives. Never mind that Shisui had never done any such thing (what kind of ANBU Special Missions Group Commander would he be if he didn’t already know who his students were seeing without ever having to ask?), and had indeed made a point of never touching on his students’ sore spots.

He’d never said anything about Yui’s tragically doomed pursuit of Tenten (Yui had only suffered heartbreak for a month before falling into the arms of one of her bevy of busty, sympathetic nurses), or tried to dissuade Ami from her tragically misguided attempts at climbing into Sasuke’s bed (success, in that case, was all the warning she needed). Sakura had been, in his opinion, too much like him, too smart and too ambitious to let her emotions ever get between her and what she really wanted; she’d been so discreet, casual and light-hearted about all her relationships that it had surprised him to have her show up on his tiny balcony one night, drunk as a skunk, sniffling one moment and protesting on behalf of Kabuto’s honour in the next.

When tentatively asked if she had any particular reason for doing that, she’d stared up at him and said, accusingly: “Not everyone is so dirty-minded as you, sensei. He’s my shishou. I would _never_.”

And then she’d gone on to mumble: “I just can’t believe that Uchiha bastard would actually propose to her, when I– and even _Ino_ –”

“There, there,” Shisui had said, helplessly, patting her on the shoulder, wishing he didn’t have to rack his brains to figure out who exactly she meant. Sometimes, he couldn’t help but feel a little wistful for the times when Uchiha simply didn’t marry out of the clan, just so that it limited the scope of romantic brangling he had to keep track of. If it wasn’t Sasuke being caught with someone’s boyfriend or girlfriend yet again, it was Ayano leading someone on, or Naoto beating up someone for daring to breathe too much in Izumi’s direction, or Ryou-kun pointedly bragging about his latest shameful escapades in the hopes that it would cause the elders to complain enough that Shisui would have to give him a talking-to. “Don’t worry, Sacchan. You’ll meet someone better for you eventually.”

He just hadn’t expected Sakura to ever decide that Naruto would be that certain someone. Which was what her coincidentally happening to be here during Shisui’s visit had to mean, if she’d go so far as hinting so heavily that his interference wouldn’t be welcome.

“Fine, fine, fine,” Shisui muttered. “Do as you damn well like.” Though, as Naruto finally came stumbling out of the shower, looking a strange mix of smug and embarrassed, Shisui had to wonder just what he was worried about, and just who might be taking advantage of who.

* * *

Two years later, on the eve of his own, low-key wedding, Shisui stared at the memorial stone for an hour or so, his mind drifting from topic to topic, never settling on any one thing, yet always avoiding the subject of the note he was fingering in his left pocket.

Finally, just as the sun began to set, he blew out a short, decisive breath, took out the note and set it on fire. “I know you’re there,” he muttered. “Just come out and get it over with.”

He couldn’t help but resent the fact that, even when he’d been expecting it, he still found himself flinching a little when Itachi’s chakra signature suddenly bloomed to life right behind him, in entirely the opposite direction of the trace he’d been absolutely certain would turn out to be the location of the hidden presence. “Shisui, if anything goes wrong–”

“Fuck you!” Shisui hissed, even as he spun around to face his most annoying cousin. “If anything goes fucking wrong, it’ll be because _you_ weakened my fucking heart!”

Itachi’s response was a slow, deliberate blink. Followed by: “You know what he’s capable of?”

Shisui had to fight back a sneer. Temper never counted for much in these occasional, secretive exchanges with his crazy cousin; the fact that Itachi had already gotten an obvious reaction from him was already his loss. So he took in a breath and counted to ten and calmed himself to say, in a flat, smooth tone: “I know.”

And then, just as Itachi narrowed his eyes, and opened his mouth to deliver yet another warning, Shisui added: “He’s no worse a danger than you, and I handle you just fine.”

Itachi smiled. It was a brief, fleeting thing, and yet, it made the hair rise on the back of Shisui’s neck. “Well, don’t say you weren’t warned.”

“As I already said,” Shisui said, coolly, “I’m keeping an eye on the situation.” The subtext being, naturally, that that meant Kabuto was none of Itachi’s concern. “Is there anything else?”

“I didn’t know that keeping an eye on potential liabilities meant your having to marry them,” was all Itachi said, in a tone of mild inquiry. “Is that policy now, in Konoha?”

Shisui badly wanted to retort something along the lines of, ‘if you’re jealous, you can always sweet talk _your_ homicidal maniac of a jinchuuriki into tying the knot’, but that too would give away how annoyed he was, so instead he simply said: “If that’s all, then I’m taking my leave.”

Three aggressive shunshins later, he was home again, and free of pesky, terrifying cousins and their equally terrifying notes full of warnings of what could have been and what might still be. The fact that some of the things in said note had confirmed certain long-held suspicions didn’t make Shisui feel any calmer. He had, in going to the meeting with Itachi, and then ending it in such a manner, assumed personal responsibility for putting an end to Kabuto if his act ever faltered so severely that he betrayed Konoha, or harmed the weakest of those under her protection.

Shisui had always lived with the thought that he might have to take the life of one of his– one of the ex-ROOT, one of his students, one of the people he watched and guarded just a little more seriously than everyone else that was nominally under his protection as a shinobi of Konohagakure. Facing it again tonight, facing the thought of having to destroy this one, strange man that he had so greedily claimed as his own… it unsettled him, made him feel a familiar, miserable detachment he never wanted to feel again.

“So?” Kabuto said, when he finally slunk back into the bedroom. “I assume he’s still doing well?”

Even though Shisui knew very well that Kabuto was only asking after Itachi’s cursed health for his sake, he couldn’t help but feel indignant, annoyed by even this superficial bit of care his lover showed for someone who thought him one step from an abomination. “You know how he is,” Shisui muttered, shrugging out of the shirt and slacks that he’d hastily put on when he discovered the note tucked under his pillow a couple hours ago. “You know, I wonder if he thinks that at some point, I’ll get so sick of seeing him show up to warn me about you that I’ll finally snap, then kill you and present him your head.”

“That again?”

“He has no shame,” Shisui muttered. “ _I_ don’t sneak into Suna every five years to wag my finger at him and that slut of a jinchuuriki…”

“I don’t know why you always say it like that,” Kabuto said, his tone amused, his hand stroking a warm line down Shisui’s bare back. “Literally every report has Itachi-san being the one who started all of it, and very aggressively, too.”

“He might have started it, but I’ll bet any amount that that boy was the one to finish it,” Shisui muttered. “He’s the son of the Kazekage, for goodness’ sake, on top of being a jinchuuriki. God knows how much he was trained for that sort of thing– certainly more than my crazy prude of a cousin ever allowed to sink into his stupid brain.”

“Hm,” Kabuto murmured, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and for a time, there was a simple, familiar silence, their increasingly slow breaths mingling, their bodies settling into their preferred sleeping positions, Kabuto on his side, and Shisui pressing his back close to Kabuto’s chest, working his cold feet in between Kabuto’s freakishly warm ones. Then: “ _Would_ you kill me?”

Shisui’s breath stopped, then started again. “Yes,” he said, simply. “If I needed to, yes.”

The sudden, explosive sigh he felt against the back of his neck was just enough of a reaction to let him know he’d failed to be convincing. “Shisui.”

“What, you want me to kill you _now_?”

“Don’t try to joke your way out of this,” Kabuto said, his tone strained, his hand tightening its formerly loose grip on Shisui’s hip. “You’re the ANBU Commander.”

“And?”

“It is your _duty_.” Shisui couldn’t help but flinch a little, hearing his lover sound so deadly serious. “Promise me.”

Two more long breaths passed between them. “And if I don’t?”

Kabuto let out another harsh sigh. Then, scooting closer, he very deliberately moved his hand from Shisui’s hip to the swell of Shisui’s ass, his fingers sinking right into the cleft, his touch both threatening and suggestive. “Promise me.”

“You– you wouldn’t,” Shisui said, hating, just this once, how well Kabuto was always able to read him, and determine the quickest way to ruin his resolve. “You can’t– hn– you _know_ how early we have to be at the fucking shrine, don’t– ah–!”

In the end, Kabuto extracted his promise, but not before Shisui was limp and far too sore, and thus in exactly the frame of mind to say things he didn’t mean in a bid to get it over with. Somehow, Kabuto’s lingering moodiness over his uncertain victory only made things better, his occasional, sharp glances adding spice to his usual, smiling expression.

“Face it,” Shisui murmured, on the way back from the interminable shrine ceremony, “you’ve played your role too well, all these years. You’re just going to have to deal with always having my eternal, unreasonable devotion.”

Possibly, Kabuto would eventually realize that none of his fervent persuasion of last night had been truly necessary. Soon enough, it would probably occur to him that Shisui would much prefer giving him a quick end rather than dooming him to be some tortuous, drawn-out death at Itachi’s hands. Until then, though, Shisui was going to revel in Kabuto’s half-helpless, half-anxious gaze and silent worrying for as long as he could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's this done. I've really enjoyed playing in this particular sandbox, and I hope you enjoyed the ride as well.


End file.
